I just came across an atricle where the US treasury department purpose to sanction crypto and the reason they give is that bitcoin is used for ransomware so if we stop the usuage of bitcoin, there will be no Ransomware attacks. How ridiculous it this ?
Such a conclusion can be made only by a person or persons who have no idea what they are talking about, or knowingly want to manipulate the public. Blaming a tool for something, not the one using it, has always been wrong - and if they are already going in that direction, let them ban the sale of firearms to civilians, thus saving thousands of innocent people every year.
In addition, the fact is that ransomware has been around since 1989, so long before anyone even thought of Bitcoin.
The first ever ransomware virus was created in 1989 by Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Popp (now known as the 'father of ransomware'). It was called the AIDS Trojan, also known as the PC Cyborg. Popp sent 20,000 infected diskettes labeled “AIDS Information – Introductory Diskettes” to attendees of the World Health Organization’s international AIDS conference in Stockholm. The disks contained malicious code that hid file directories, locked file names and demanded victims send $189 to a PO Box in Panama if they wanted their data back. The AIDS Trojan was “generation one” ransomware malware and relatively easy to overcome. The Trojan used simple symmetric cryptography and tools were soon available to decrypt the file names. But the AIDS Trojan set the scene for what was to come.
